Thomas Guinzburg, one of the founders of the Paris Review and the former president of Viking, the publishing house founded by his father, died on Wednesday at 84 of complications of heart bypass surgery.

In 1953, Guinzburg, along with George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron and Donald Hall, founded the Paris Review and served as its first managing editor. In 1954, he joined the staff of Viking in the publicity department, and took over as president in 1961 when his father died. He sold the press to Pearson Longman, owners of Penguin, in 1975, and stayed on as president until 1978. He devoted much of the rest of his life to charity work.

The list of authors he nurtured includes extraordinary names such as Thomas Pynchon, Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch. He also briefly employed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as an editor in the mid 1970s.